Pammies.com: Berners ‑ Lee Internet Pioneer Biography

Quote From Novell CEO Eric Schmidt of TIME:

"If computer networking were a traditional science, Berners-Lee would win a Nobel Prize"

This article contains quotes from the British Engineer and Computer Scientist
Sir Timothy Berners-Lee. Whilst working at Cern in 1989 he invented
the World Wide Web. In 1990 aided by Robert Cailliau, they produced the
hypertext proposal that navigates the Internet. Additionally, the article
contains links to the myriad awards and honors accredited to Tim Berners-Lee.

Education & Career

Thoughts from Berners-Lee: Emanuel School was programmed to send people to
Oxford, The Maths teacher at Emanuel, Frank Grundy, who conveyed the
excitement of the subject with a twinkle of his eye. He could make numerical
approximations in his head, faster than we could work it out longhand, and
would throw in a teaser question in his conversation to puzzle anyone
thinking that they might have figured the subject out.

Unlike most people at Oxford, I had one tutor
for almost all the work. John Moffat has a very rare talent for being able to
understand not only the physics itself, but also my tangled misguided
attempts at it, and then showing me in my terms; using my strange symbols,
and vocabulary, where I had gone wrong. Many people can only explain the
world from their own point of view.

In 1976, Tim Berners-Lee: graduated from Queen's College, at Oxford
University in England. While there, he built his first computer with a
soldering iron, TTL gates, Plessey Telecommunications
LTD (Poole,Dorset, UK), a major UK Telecom equipment manufacturer, working
on distributed transaction systems, message relays, and bar code technology.

In 1978, he left Plessey to join D.G Nash Ltd (Ferndown, Dorset, UK),
where he wrote among other things a typesetting software for intelligent
printers. In addition, a year and a half was spent as an independent
consultant. Including a six-month stint from June - Dec 1980 as consultant
software engineer at CERN The European Particle,
Physics Laboratory: Geneva Switzerland.

While there, he wrote for his own private use, his first program that
stored information which included using random associations. This was a
Notebook program named ENQUIRE the
idea being from, 'Enquire-Within-Upon-Everything', the program allowed
linking, each node had a title, a type, and a list of Bi-directional typed
links. 'ENQUIRE' run on Norsk Data machines, under SINTRAN-III. It was never
published; this program formed the conceptual basis for the future
development of the World Wide Web.

From 1981 until 1984, Tim worked at John Poole's Image Computer System Ltd having
technical design responsibility. Work there included real time control
firmware graphics, and in 1984, he took up a Fellowship at CERN to work on
distributed real-time systems, for scientific data acquisition, and system
control. Among other things, he worked on FASTBUS system software, and
designed a heterogeneous, remote procedure call system.

In 1989, he proposed a global hypertext project, predestined to be known
as the World Wide Web. Based on the earlier 'Enquire' work, it was designed
to allow people to work together, by combining their knowledge in a web of
hypertext documents. He wrote the first 'World Wide Web' server, 'HTTPD' and
the first client; World Wide Web: a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get WYSIWYG This
work was started in October 1990, and the program World Wide Web, was first
made available within CERN, in December, and on the Internet at large; by the
summer of 1991.

In 1994, Tim joined the Laboratory for Computer Science LCS at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology: M I T In 1999, he
became the first holder of the 3Com Founders
Chair He is Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, that co-ordinates
Web development worldwide, with teams at MIT, INRIA in France, and at Keio University: Japan. The
Consortium takes as its goal, to lead the Web to its full potential, ensuring
its stability, through rapid evolution, and revolutionary transformations of
its usage. The Consortium is found at http://www.w3.org/

Information from the 'Living Internet' Tim Berners-Lee, the
British mastermind of the World Wide Web, is among 43 new fellows elected to
the distinguished UK scientific body.

The Universal Resource Locator (URL) was created in 1994 by Tim
Berners-Lee (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1738) It is an addressing system to
give each Web page a unique location for example:
http://www.pammies.com/sir-tim-berners-lee-bio.html is the address of this web
page.

Timothy Berners-Lee was awarded an OBE in 1997 in recognition of his
invention and subsequent development and designing of the World Wide Web. His
work has revolutionized communication via the Internet, enabling universal
access to information placed on the Web.

Sir Timothy Berners-Lee More Awards

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